I wish I could take your ideals seriously, but imagining a solution for society is not the same as implementing a solution. Even if whatever you want to do is provably the best possible outcome, society is built of a whole bunch of people that aren't you, many of whom don't care to listen to your solution let alone follow through on it.
No kidding. There are some 500 congressmen who all have to agree on a bill to pass a law, and they have to convince millions of people to vote them in in the first place. Plus there are technical considerations: everything I said is correct, but none of it explains how to manage a classroom and transfer base intellectual skills to children, or how to modify that setting for low-income classrooms and such.
The problems are hard, but we have to first consider that wood burns before we can consider that wood can provide fuel, that boiling water can provide pressure by burning wood, that other fuels (oil, gas) can provide internal combustion, and that great big machines can be built using internal combustion engines. Right now, nobody has accepted that wood burns (and gets hot when it does so) as an engineering fact.
Isn't taking Adderall to study longer another way to employ your brain differently?
In the same way that beating something with a wrench and beating it *faster* with a wrench is different, yes.
Do you dispute that a highly motivated intelligent student would perform better with more time to study?
No. I dispute that an un-motivated, idiotic student with more time to study would perform similar to a highly-motivated, intelligent student. I suggest that an un-motivated, idiotic student would perform similar to a highly-motivated, intelligent student if the former learned to use motivational techniques (e.g. examine the material to study, briefly analyze it from an engineering standpoint, and incorporate it into something of high interest to you) and mental techniques (e.g. SQ3R studying, deliberate practice, mnemonics) similar to those employed by the latter or such as to make them regard the material in a similar way to the latter.
Imagine a future where finishing college in 4 years is a red flag that you don't work hard enough. Where all the high achievers finish in three years with an internship every year and studying abroad and some kind of volunteer project on the side while being in 5 different on-campus organizations and leading at least one of them. And then when that's all over, the same people are expected to work 100-hour weeks all the time.
Besides solving poverty, I am working on the more difficult task of creating an education system which equips small children up-front with the mental tools and techniques to function as geniuses. This has produced some interesting reflections about the nature of education and poverty--that you need tailored strategies for the local culture to make the education system actually work, and so must have a different approach to the same education in poor, inner-city ghettos--among other things. What, then, would you say about a world where not having the education which turns any arbitrary human into a genius is a disadvantage? Is it much different?
I will tell you that I am strongly tolerant of psychosis. I have been afflicted with drug-induced psychosis and with psychologically-induced psychosis. I spent a decade on methylphenedate, eventually paired with risperdal, which induced weak drug psychosis; from this, much of my life has been spent as a collection of many points of view, in which I am a single person existing dozens or hundreds of times, and can move between these viewpoints at will so as to avoid stress. I also learned to stand up separate personalities (under my control, but also semi-autonomous), and so was able to supply myself with constant psychiatric counseling using an array of internal counselors. I was later exposed to prednizone--this was a mistake, and caused severe mood swings, suicidal ideation, homicidal ideation, and so forth; I of course recognized and controlled these mental disturbances, with no outwardly-visible detriment.
Along with the drug-induced psychosis, I've triggered arguably-worse psychotic episodes from psychological burn-out, learning too many things at once, too fast. The results are similar. There is also the strange loss of touch with reality from this: hyper-immersion in work and study tends to make everything around you look like that work, for example making physical automobile traffic seem like something you could improve with the skillful use of firewalls...somehow.... This is a well-known psychiatric condition caused in normal human beings exposed to excessive job stress; it's actually common for college students to suffer dramatic neurotic breakdown in their late third or early fourth year.
Given that simply using your brain too hard can easily cause serious psychiatric pathology, what opinion do you have of simply improving the general education system?
And here is the UN funded 2012 study of the imports to Ghana which found 91% reuse. http://www.basel.int/Portals/4... [basel.int] This was the study that caused BAN.org (the NGO) to backtrack on their claims.
They didn't want the reuse numbers to get out because their campaign was really about one important American family value: black people shouldn't be allowed near computers. They'll dirty the Internet up.
I'm using hundreds of studies ranging from 40 people to 50,000 people, using interview, observation, and experimentation methods.
I would bet that you've always found mathematics interesting. I used to find mathematics quite interesting, and so I learned mathematics at an incredibly rapid rate. I learned mathematics so well, in fact, that I theorized new mathematics before they were introduced. Once, in high school, I had a calculus teacher explain to us that there is no chain rule in integral calculus; having found the chain rule so useful and not believing that the rules of mathematics wouldn't bend to my will, I ignored the remainder of the 40-minute lecture in favor of developing a chain rule for integration. For the next three weeks, I was the only person in the class using the integration by parts method; then we reached that chapter in the book, and I was annoyed at my teacher for being such an idiot. It hadn't crossed my mind to blame myself for not reading forward before investing so much effort in breaking the rules.
I never had much trouble with math because I would examine all the behaviors of mathematics and relate them to each other. Rather than memorize formulas, I would learn how the different pieces interacted by examining how they were similar to other formulas. I broke them down into components, understood how the components worked, and then could later remember the rough outline and reconstruct the formulas from that. I could also approach novel problems with novel methods, avoiding a great deal of mathematical effort. I did all of this while my peers were drilling such dull things as the quadratic equation; by the time they had memorized by overlearning, I had memorized by making the material meaningful, creating a network of well-connected memories that were understandable and relatable.
You will undoubtedly notice that my form of learning mathematics was different than the standard form of reading, memorizing, and practicing. Whereas a normal student will spend hours with flash cards drilling the formula for a parabola or a hyperbola, I'd take the time to notice that a parabola, hyperbola, and ellipse are all different types of conic sections of the form of a two-dimensional plane intersecting with a projected cone formed by a line crossing an origin and rotating. Describing this behavior mathematically leads to the interesting problem of describing a unified conic section equation, which leads to the interesting problem of simplifying equations for each conic section as described within their two-dimensional plane, which leads to deep understanding of conic sections. Likewise, I quickly converted the law of cosines into a unified equation: c^2 = a^2 + b^2 - 2ab * cos(theta) is obviously the pythagorean theorem where cos(theta) = 0 (i.e. for a right triangle), and so only had to memorize -2ab*cos(theta), which is trivially described.
These are not feats of memory or mathematical genius. These are simple observations, creating meaning out of the chaos of arbitrary mathematical facts. I do not doubt that your understanding of mathematics was rich and complex all throughout your educational career; you probably took a more efficient approach, as I had, in completely understanding and dissecting the various mathematical concepts you were given, applying all of your prior mathematical education to every new piece of information. It obviously never occurred to your peers to approach the subject of math in this way; but do you believe that they would have not made greater progress than they had, were they to apply similar methods of thought?
there are clear differences in intelligence between Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and yourself
Yes. Albert Einstein thought a lot about classical physics; Stephen Hawking thought a lot about theoretical quantum mechanics. If I had put the sort of deliberate study in that Stephen Hawking puts in, I could argue with him about the same shit. Likewise, if I save stated Super Metroid and put in the deliberate practice hours that oatsNgoats or Zoasty put in (Oats is using methods fully supported by modern leading cognitive theory), I could keep up with them in a race. It wouldn't even take that long; an hour a day for a few months.
And some kids do try hard and just can't get the same grades as others. The others probably had a head start with more educated parents, or they have better learning techniques, or their personalities are just better suited to school.
Started earlier, had better resources, better methods, or really just care to learn while other kids frankly don't give a shit. You're not even stretching this; they're all the same, just they're employing their brains differently.
Often the things that are brought up are extremes, and ridiculous; but, as we start to accept that they're ridiculous, people start to creep on them. 50 years ago, people would scream bloody murder about the government tapping phone lines--they even impeached the President! Now, they shrug and talk about protecting us from terrorists with all this state surveillance, because the government would never do anything bad with all that information.
Your argument was effectively "it must do something bad! It's a stim! They make your heart asplode!", so I shot the specific. You've reduced it to, "Well it must hurt SOMEHOW," which is the same fallacy as the trade-off concept.
The trade-off concept is the familiar idea that you can't improve something by making it worse in every way. I usually address this by smashing a beverage vessel such that it no longer holds a beverage, and is perhaps laden with dangerous jagged edges, and deformed so as to take up more storage space. It is obviously possible to adjust something to be worse in every way, up to and including creatively destroying the object's entire useful purpose while making it a burden and a danger.
I did suggest that scientific studies were minimal, and that they gave a good risk outline with empirical evidence but did not give a complete and high-quality scientific image. The problems caused by amphetamines, methylphenedate, and caffeine are obvious, and stand out strikingly; we have enough empirical evidence to show that phenotropil carries none of the negative consequences of these drugs, and nothing notable on its own (upset stomach, for example, can happen--that can also happen with Rolaids, cough syrup, or Diet Coke). We've also seen no notable long-term consequences, despite there being obvious long-term public users--which gives a low but existent measure of confidence.
I am, in fact, quantifying within reason, using a number of data sources of varying quality. I do the same with prescription drugs believed to be safe; hell, I do the same with the belief that fat and salt are bad for you, and now science is reflecting what I've been actively considering for years: that the science behind the original claims was weak and, in some cases, totally invalid (saturated fat dietary concerns were based on cherry-picked data). I don't have 100% confidence in anything, but I do have enough confidence in various measures and observations to scale them against one another.
I was more referring to the fact that Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and I all share brains with the same functional facilities. You're not born with a genetic superbrain.
Phenotropil is specifically noted for its affect on neurotransmitters, without increasing heart rate or blood pressure. It is part of the racetemic group of compounds, which are the codifying compounds for nootropics; the pharmacological definition of a nootropic excludes things like gingko and vinpocetine (which are often claimed as nootropics), because it explicitly excludes anything that raises blood flow to the brain (blood pressure and heart rate increases would do this). It is specifically notable among nootropics for being a stimulant, and specifically notable among stimulants for not raising blood pressure or heart rate, as well as for not producing withdrawal or other forms of dependency.
If you want a cruder definition of "safe", I'll simply say that it's a shitton less bad than caffeine.
I was going to say "These people are idiots" but yeah. They take a car that's going to run for another 5 years; trade it for a car that's going to cost $100/mo less in maintenance, $50/mo less in fuel; and take a 5 year extension of their car payment.
I've been on and off SAM-e; but it triggers hypomania, and I've been stable for a while. Ridiculously stable. After over a year, it's still an alien feeling. I spent almost 30 years continuously depressed, and then triggered a hypomanic (and a manic!) episode, and realized I was bipolar (and in the lucky 7% that can drug-modify it with SAM-e). A year later, it just kind of leveled out, and I became... normal. Ish. It just feels weird to be dead-center.
The problem is I'm unmotivated dead-center. I noticed that when I started experimenting: I work well when I'm depressed, and I work great when I'm hypomanic; mania is horrible (feels too good, don't like it, hard to think), and being baseline is... I don't do anything. I zone out watching twitch videos. I type nothing on a keyboard and listen to the keys click. There are things I want to do, but I just... feel fine.
I've been trying to rewrite habits, but that's not working well. I'll take up cardiovascular physical activity next--that's been delayed due to a vendor dispute which is ending in a chargeback this week.
Your daughter is getting ready to take her SATs; she's smart and ambitious, and wants to get into a top-tier school, eventually going into med school. Recent anonymous surveys indicate that 20% or more of students taking the test are using enhancers. Nobody's been able to do a formal study, but there are indications that these students are seeing boosts of 200-300 points in their scores. What advice do you give your daughter?
Get good, scrub.
Come on. Staying up 100+ hours? Yeah, you need good drugs for that, and you're going to regret it. Passing a test? Learning is not hard; it's effort, but it's solved effort. If any single person can get a perfect score on the SAT without funny drugs, your kid can.
Yeah, but what about people like me, who cause this when under a baseline drug state? I don't even take caffeine; I used to take phenotropil, but it didn't help my work (I can see how it would, and it did help other things; having a more stable awake state is great).
I read everything that happens, constantly. I assemble all kinds of information in all kinds of ways. In effect, the human mind is a tool, and it's use requires skilled technique: geniuses don't have super brains, but rather have procedural skills for using a typical human brain. My set of tools and techniques includes methods of thinking which rapidly and effectively solve problems in the short and long term; I also tend to pile up technical information related to my job, so I can usually solve problems *while they're being explained to me*.
This is something anyone can do, but it takes effort. This is how rock star programmers work. This is how genius engineers work. They aren't born that way; they're made that way. How do you deal with the creep of people who just have more motivation and interest in their job, and so do a better job than you?
Methinks it's the obvious: 99% of people hate their job, and the remaining 1% have figured out that there is *a* job out there that's awesome, and so they quit and went and found *that* job. Those are your rock stars. They're often the people who show up when the company is a mess, fix a bunch of problems, then walk off. They're the programmers who get hired when you need to build a new system, then quit when that system goes into maintenance mode and the company stops making new things. They're the nurses and doctors who take jobs that interest them, the niche scientists doing archaeology, even global salesmen who travel all over the place to negotiate big contracts with international companies.
The rest of you need to figure out why you hate your job, what you would actually want from a job, and then go find that job. If that job burns out, find another one that satisfies you. No purple pills will take the place of that.
Methylphenedate and adderall (dextroamphetamine) are dangerous: they cause psychosis (well-known). Caffeine causes withdrawal effects, and normalizes (you're not more productive on caffeine after you've become addicted). Phenotropil is the only safe stimulant I've found, but it's easy to build a tolerance--no negative effects, just it stops working. This is a matter of dosing: the normal dose is 100mg multiple times each day, and my analysis of the molecules (molecular weight, number of phenyl groups) tells me 16mg-24mg 1-3 times per day would be more correct for a 150lb adult male. The white elephant in the room is really the response: 100mg of phenotropil produces a noticeable stimulant effect; the normal prescribed doses of Methylphenedate and Dex only produce a cognitive benefit (they treat ADHD without making you hyperactive). People, of course, keep reving the engine until they feel it working, subtle effect be damned.
The same goes for modafinil. Modafinil will effectively let you sleep 8 hours for every 56 awake, no toxicity and no side effects; the new Armodafinil is less safe, but more profitable. Adrafinil metabolizes in the liver into modafinil; this puts strain on the liver, and can cause damage in the long term.
People are popping armodafinil, dex, and other dangerous crap all the damn time. The stuff that's safe has been backed by a few studies, but is either well-studied and scheduled tightly (modafinil--safe, not legal) or studied reasonably-well (i.e. not concrete, so not as certain, but toxicology is at least explored) and OTC legal. This leads to people mostly getting dangerous prescription drugs illegally (Modafinil aside) and abusing them, or getting understood-safe non-prescription drugs legally and having no good guidance on how to use them because their medical application hasn't actually been well-explored.
Of course, you also have the issue of drug interactions, long-term use, and so forth. Phenotropil is known pretty safe, but what are its drug interactions? What kind of effects will you get with high, long-term use, like some people do with 400mg per day doses for years? Will you start to develop psychosis after months or years, like with the other stims? We know it's absolutely safe at 100mg doses for months on end, but we don't know about 500mg doses for weeks or months or years on end; we're not even sure about 20mg doses for years on end. Even assuming drug safety, we don't know if it can chronically treat any condition or provide any benefit.
Then you have stuff like noopept that just jacks up your BNF and BDNF--which is great, but 10 minutes on a bicycle will do that. Not kidding. This is the most powerful cognitive enhancer on the market, and it's equivalent to a short jog.
So you're telling me gcc inlines functions from libqt when you compile a program against qt's headers?
But regardless, C++ has a class encapulation system which allows early binding, which ObjectiveC does not
Binding is still done at run-time, and is still a matter of setting a pointer somewhere. It's functionally similar to a page fault: if it happens and it's satisfied, the computer just calls as normal; if it happens and isn't satisfied, the computer does some work first. All you're changing is the point in time the work is done, not the number of times.
I have never gone to a dealer for brakes. I did go to the Mazda dealer for a brand new windshield, new engine mount (broken), oil change, tire rotation, and a diagnostic of why my check engine light was on (faulty part), at a total cost of $328. The exhaust had broken off the manifold, and they repaired that as well.
I've been quoted $676 for two wheels at a Goodyear-Gemini mechanic; $550 at a Mr. Tire; and over $800 at an independent mechanic down the street.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I could take your ideals seriously, but imagining a solution for society is not the same as implementing a solution. Even if whatever you want to do is provably the best possible outcome, society is built of a whole bunch of people that aren't you, many of whom don't care to listen to your solution let alone follow through on it.
No kidding. There are some 500 congressmen who all have to agree on a bill to pass a law, and they have to convince millions of people to vote them in in the first place. Plus there are technical considerations: everything I said is correct, but none of it explains how to manage a classroom and transfer base intellectual skills to children, or how to modify that setting for low-income classrooms and such.
The problems are hard, but we have to first consider that wood burns before we can consider that wood can provide fuel, that boiling water can provide pressure by burning wood, that other fuels (oil, gas) can provide internal combustion, and that great big machines can be built using internal combustion engines. Right now, nobody has accepted that wood burns (and gets hot when it does so) as an engineering fact.
Isn't taking Adderall to study longer another way to employ your brain differently?
In the same way that beating something with a wrench and beating it *faster* with a wrench is different, yes.
Do you dispute that a highly motivated intelligent student would perform better with more time to study?
No. I dispute that an un-motivated, idiotic student with more time to study would perform similar to a highly-motivated, intelligent student. I suggest that an un-motivated, idiotic student would perform similar to a highly-motivated, intelligent student if the former learned to use motivational techniques (e.g. examine the material to study, briefly analyze it from an engineering standpoint, and incorporate it into something of high interest to you) and mental techniques (e.g. SQ3R studying, deliberate practice, mnemonics) similar to those employed by the latter or such as to make them regard the material in a similar way to the latter.
Imagine a future where finishing college in 4 years is a red flag that you don't work hard enough. Where all the high achievers finish in three years with an internship every year and studying abroad and some kind of volunteer project on the side while being in 5 different on-campus organizations and leading at least one of them. And then when that's all over, the same people are expected to work 100-hour weeks all the time.
Besides solving poverty, I am working on the more difficult task of creating an education system which equips small children up-front with the mental tools and techniques to function as geniuses. This has produced some interesting reflections about the nature of education and poverty--that you need tailored strategies for the local culture to make the education system actually work, and so must have a different approach to the same education in poor, inner-city ghettos--among other things. What, then, would you say about a world where not having the education which turns any arbitrary human into a genius is a disadvantage? Is it much different?
I will tell you that I am strongly tolerant of psychosis. I have been afflicted with drug-induced psychosis and with psychologically-induced psychosis. I spent a decade on methylphenedate, eventually paired with risperdal, which induced weak drug psychosis; from this, much of my life has been spent as a collection of many points of view, in which I am a single person existing dozens or hundreds of times, and can move between these viewpoints at will so as to avoid stress. I also learned to stand up separate personalities (under my control, but also semi-autonomous), and so was able to supply myself with constant psychiatric counseling using an array of internal counselors. I was later exposed to prednizone--this was a mistake, and caused severe mood swings, suicidal ideation, homicidal ideation, and so forth; I of course recognized and controlled these mental disturbances, with no outwardly-visible detriment.
Along with the drug-induced psychosis, I've triggered arguably-worse psychotic episodes from psychological burn-out, learning too many things at once, too fast. The results are similar. There is also the strange loss of touch with reality from this: hyper-immersion in work and study tends to make everything around you look like that work, for example making physical automobile traffic seem like something you could improve with the skillful use of firewalls...somehow.... This is a well-known psychiatric condition caused in normal human beings exposed to excessive job stress; it's actually common for college students to suffer dramatic neurotic breakdown in their late third or early fourth year.
Given that simply using your brain too hard can easily cause serious psychiatric pathology, what opinion do you have of simply improving the general education system?
Long ass thread of entitled bullshit.
It wasn't necessary 50 years ago, and it's not necessary now.
And here is the UN funded 2012 study of the imports to Ghana which found 91% reuse. http://www.basel.int/Portals/4... [basel.int] This was the study that caused BAN.org (the NGO) to backtrack on their claims.
They didn't want the reuse numbers to get out because their campaign was really about one important American family value: black people shouldn't be allowed near computers. They'll dirty the Internet up.
They dump it in international waters.
I'm using hundreds of studies ranging from 40 people to 50,000 people, using interview, observation, and experimentation methods.
I would bet that you've always found mathematics interesting. I used to find mathematics quite interesting, and so I learned mathematics at an incredibly rapid rate. I learned mathematics so well, in fact, that I theorized new mathematics before they were introduced. Once, in high school, I had a calculus teacher explain to us that there is no chain rule in integral calculus; having found the chain rule so useful and not believing that the rules of mathematics wouldn't bend to my will, I ignored the remainder of the 40-minute lecture in favor of developing a chain rule for integration. For the next three weeks, I was the only person in the class using the integration by parts method; then we reached that chapter in the book, and I was annoyed at my teacher for being such an idiot. It hadn't crossed my mind to blame myself for not reading forward before investing so much effort in breaking the rules.
I never had much trouble with math because I would examine all the behaviors of mathematics and relate them to each other. Rather than memorize formulas, I would learn how the different pieces interacted by examining how they were similar to other formulas. I broke them down into components, understood how the components worked, and then could later remember the rough outline and reconstruct the formulas from that. I could also approach novel problems with novel methods, avoiding a great deal of mathematical effort. I did all of this while my peers were drilling such dull things as the quadratic equation; by the time they had memorized by overlearning, I had memorized by making the material meaningful, creating a network of well-connected memories that were understandable and relatable.
You will undoubtedly notice that my form of learning mathematics was different than the standard form of reading, memorizing, and practicing. Whereas a normal student will spend hours with flash cards drilling the formula for a parabola or a hyperbola, I'd take the time to notice that a parabola, hyperbola, and ellipse are all different types of conic sections of the form of a two-dimensional plane intersecting with a projected cone formed by a line crossing an origin and rotating. Describing this behavior mathematically leads to the interesting problem of describing a unified conic section equation, which leads to the interesting problem of simplifying equations for each conic section as described within their two-dimensional plane, which leads to deep understanding of conic sections. Likewise, I quickly converted the law of cosines into a unified equation: c^2 = a^2 + b^2 - 2ab * cos(theta) is obviously the pythagorean theorem where cos(theta) = 0 (i.e. for a right triangle), and so only had to memorize -2ab*cos(theta), which is trivially described.
These are not feats of memory or mathematical genius. These are simple observations, creating meaning out of the chaos of arbitrary mathematical facts. I do not doubt that your understanding of mathematics was rich and complex all throughout your educational career; you probably took a more efficient approach, as I had, in completely understanding and dissecting the various mathematical concepts you were given, applying all of your prior mathematical education to every new piece of information. It obviously never occurred to your peers to approach the subject of math in this way; but do you believe that they would have not made greater progress than they had, were they to apply similar methods of thought?
there are clear differences in intelligence between Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and yourself
Yes. Albert Einstein thought a lot about classical physics; Stephen Hawking thought a lot about theoretical quantum mechanics. If I had put the sort of deliberate study in that Stephen Hawking puts in, I could argue with him about the same shit. Likewise, if I save stated Super Metroid and put in the deliberate practice hours that oatsNgoats or Zoasty put in (Oats is using methods fully supported by modern leading cognitive theory), I could keep up with them in a race. It wouldn't even take that long; an hour a day for a few months.
And some kids do try hard and just can't get the same grades as others. The others probably had a head start with more educated parents, or they have better learning techniques, or their personalities are just better suited to school.
Started earlier, had better resources, better methods, or really just care to learn while other kids frankly don't give a shit. You're not even stretching this; they're all the same, just they're employing their brains differently.
I like the version that uses the archaic "reckon" instead of calculate.
Often the things that are brought up are extremes, and ridiculous; but, as we start to accept that they're ridiculous, people start to creep on them. 50 years ago, people would scream bloody murder about the government tapping phone lines--they even impeached the President! Now, they shrug and talk about protecting us from terrorists with all this state surveillance, because the government would never do anything bad with all that information.
Your argument was effectively "it must do something bad! It's a stim! They make your heart asplode!", so I shot the specific. You've reduced it to, "Well it must hurt SOMEHOW," which is the same fallacy as the trade-off concept.
The trade-off concept is the familiar idea that you can't improve something by making it worse in every way. I usually address this by smashing a beverage vessel such that it no longer holds a beverage, and is perhaps laden with dangerous jagged edges, and deformed so as to take up more storage space. It is obviously possible to adjust something to be worse in every way, up to and including creatively destroying the object's entire useful purpose while making it a burden and a danger.
I did suggest that scientific studies were minimal, and that they gave a good risk outline with empirical evidence but did not give a complete and high-quality scientific image. The problems caused by amphetamines, methylphenedate, and caffeine are obvious, and stand out strikingly; we have enough empirical evidence to show that phenotropil carries none of the negative consequences of these drugs, and nothing notable on its own (upset stomach, for example, can happen--that can also happen with Rolaids, cough syrup, or Diet Coke). We've also seen no notable long-term consequences, despite there being obvious long-term public users--which gives a low but existent measure of confidence.
I am, in fact, quantifying within reason, using a number of data sources of varying quality. I do the same with prescription drugs believed to be safe; hell, I do the same with the belief that fat and salt are bad for you, and now science is reflecting what I've been actively considering for years: that the science behind the original claims was weak and, in some cases, totally invalid (saturated fat dietary concerns were based on cherry-picked data). I don't have 100% confidence in anything, but I do have enough confidence in various measures and observations to scale them against one another.
I was more referring to the fact that Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and I all share brains with the same functional facilities. You're not born with a genetic superbrain.
Phenotropil is specifically noted for its affect on neurotransmitters, without increasing heart rate or blood pressure. It is part of the racetemic group of compounds, which are the codifying compounds for nootropics; the pharmacological definition of a nootropic excludes things like gingko and vinpocetine (which are often claimed as nootropics), because it explicitly excludes anything that raises blood flow to the brain (blood pressure and heart rate increases would do this). It is specifically notable among nootropics for being a stimulant, and specifically notable among stimulants for not raising blood pressure or heart rate, as well as for not producing withdrawal or other forms of dependency.
If you want a cruder definition of "safe", I'll simply say that it's a shitton less bad than caffeine.
I was going to say "These people are idiots" but yeah. They take a car that's going to run for another 5 years; trade it for a car that's going to cost $100/mo less in maintenance, $50/mo less in fuel; and take a 5 year extension of their car payment.
he'd rather explain failure to deliver than abuse his people. Good boss. When the abuse got too bad he walked us all off the job
Was that Paul?
Intelligence is technique. Einstein, Hawking, and Joe the Plumber all have the same mental faculties.
I've been on and off SAM-e; but it triggers hypomania, and I've been stable for a while. Ridiculously stable. After over a year, it's still an alien feeling. I spent almost 30 years continuously depressed, and then triggered a hypomanic (and a manic!) episode, and realized I was bipolar (and in the lucky 7% that can drug-modify it with SAM-e). A year later, it just kind of leveled out, and I became... normal. Ish. It just feels weird to be dead-center.
The problem is I'm unmotivated dead-center. I noticed that when I started experimenting: I work well when I'm depressed, and I work great when I'm hypomanic; mania is horrible (feels too good, don't like it, hard to think), and being baseline is ... I don't do anything. I zone out watching twitch videos. I type nothing on a keyboard and listen to the keys click. There are things I want to do, but I just... feel fine.
I've been trying to rewrite habits, but that's not working well. I'll take up cardiovascular physical activity next--that's been delayed due to a vendor dispute which is ending in a chargeback this week.
it's like 5mg of dextroamphetamine. You don't mix up 400mg and shoot it into your arm.
Tell your supervisor to have fun with that and call you when he needs the collapsing infrastructure put back together in a weekend.
Your daughter is getting ready to take her SATs; she's smart and ambitious, and wants to get into a top-tier school, eventually going into med school. Recent anonymous surveys indicate that 20% or more of students taking the test are using enhancers. Nobody's been able to do a formal study, but there are indications that these students are seeing boosts of 200-300 points in their scores. What advice do you give your daughter?
Get good, scrub.
Come on. Staying up 100+ hours? Yeah, you need good drugs for that, and you're going to regret it. Passing a test? Learning is not hard; it's effort, but it's solved effort. If any single person can get a perfect score on the SAT without funny drugs, your kid can.
Yeah, but what about people like me, who cause this when under a baseline drug state? I don't even take caffeine; I used to take phenotropil, but it didn't help my work (I can see how it would, and it did help other things; having a more stable awake state is great).
I read everything that happens, constantly. I assemble all kinds of information in all kinds of ways. In effect, the human mind is a tool, and it's use requires skilled technique: geniuses don't have super brains, but rather have procedural skills for using a typical human brain. My set of tools and techniques includes methods of thinking which rapidly and effectively solve problems in the short and long term; I also tend to pile up technical information related to my job, so I can usually solve problems *while they're being explained to me*.
This is something anyone can do, but it takes effort. This is how rock star programmers work. This is how genius engineers work. They aren't born that way; they're made that way. How do you deal with the creep of people who just have more motivation and interest in their job, and so do a better job than you?
Methinks it's the obvious: 99% of people hate their job, and the remaining 1% have figured out that there is *a* job out there that's awesome, and so they quit and went and found *that* job. Those are your rock stars. They're often the people who show up when the company is a mess, fix a bunch of problems, then walk off. They're the programmers who get hired when you need to build a new system, then quit when that system goes into maintenance mode and the company stops making new things. They're the nurses and doctors who take jobs that interest them, the niche scientists doing archaeology, even global salesmen who travel all over the place to negotiate big contracts with international companies.
The rest of you need to figure out why you hate your job, what you would actually want from a job, and then go find that job. If that job burns out, find another one that satisfies you. No purple pills will take the place of that.
Methylphenedate and adderall (dextroamphetamine) are dangerous: they cause psychosis (well-known). Caffeine causes withdrawal effects, and normalizes (you're not more productive on caffeine after you've become addicted). Phenotropil is the only safe stimulant I've found, but it's easy to build a tolerance--no negative effects, just it stops working. This is a matter of dosing: the normal dose is 100mg multiple times each day, and my analysis of the molecules (molecular weight, number of phenyl groups) tells me 16mg-24mg 1-3 times per day would be more correct for a 150lb adult male. The white elephant in the room is really the response: 100mg of phenotropil produces a noticeable stimulant effect; the normal prescribed doses of Methylphenedate and Dex only produce a cognitive benefit (they treat ADHD without making you hyperactive). People, of course, keep reving the engine until they feel it working, subtle effect be damned.
The same goes for modafinil. Modafinil will effectively let you sleep 8 hours for every 56 awake, no toxicity and no side effects; the new Armodafinil is less safe, but more profitable. Adrafinil metabolizes in the liver into modafinil; this puts strain on the liver, and can cause damage in the long term.
People are popping armodafinil, dex, and other dangerous crap all the damn time. The stuff that's safe has been backed by a few studies, but is either well-studied and scheduled tightly (modafinil--safe, not legal) or studied reasonably-well (i.e. not concrete, so not as certain, but toxicology is at least explored) and OTC legal. This leads to people mostly getting dangerous prescription drugs illegally (Modafinil aside) and abusing them, or getting understood-safe non-prescription drugs legally and having no good guidance on how to use them because their medical application hasn't actually been well-explored.
Of course, you also have the issue of drug interactions, long-term use, and so forth. Phenotropil is known pretty safe, but what are its drug interactions? What kind of effects will you get with high, long-term use, like some people do with 400mg per day doses for years? Will you start to develop psychosis after months or years, like with the other stims? We know it's absolutely safe at 100mg doses for months on end, but we don't know about 500mg doses for weeks or months or years on end; we're not even sure about 20mg doses for years on end. Even assuming drug safety, we don't know if it can chronically treat any condition or provide any benefit.
Then you have stuff like noopept that just jacks up your BNF and BDNF--which is great, but 10 minutes on a bicycle will do that. Not kidding. This is the most powerful cognitive enhancer on the market, and it's equivalent to a short jog.
I don't think the linker does that sort of inlining. It would require complex compiler optimization. It just resolves the PLT to the local binary.
So you're telling me gcc inlines functions from libqt when you compile a program against qt's headers?
But regardless, C++ has a class encapulation system which allows early binding, which ObjectiveC does not
Binding is still done at run-time, and is still a matter of setting a pointer somewhere. It's functionally similar to a page fault: if it happens and it's satisfied, the computer just calls as normal; if it happens and isn't satisfied, the computer does some work first. All you're changing is the point in time the work is done, not the number of times.
I have never gone to a dealer for brakes. I did go to the Mazda dealer for a brand new windshield, new engine mount (broken), oil change, tire rotation, and a diagnostic of why my check engine light was on (faulty part), at a total cost of $328. The exhaust had broken off the manifold, and they repaired that as well.
I've been quoted $676 for two wheels at a Goodyear-Gemini mechanic; $550 at a Mr. Tire; and over $800 at an independent mechanic down the street.